Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
SALMAN RUSHDIEWe are the storytelling animal.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
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When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
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You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
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Faith without doubt is addiction.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
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The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
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Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
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Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE